>>> its making a comeback more than 30 years later. im talking about the era and a filmmaker is taking a grassroots approach to her fight for equal rights for women in the workplace. >> men and women still dont have equal rights under the law in the united states of america. >> you know, women and men still dont get paid equally. >> why? >> why? >> yes. >> because they want a cheap labor pool, and that cheap labor pool is females. >> on average in this country today, a woman at the end of her working life has lost $400,000 to wage discrimination. >> so this is where youre going to see that. its on the crowd sourcing website kick starter and is being used to raise money for a documentary to revitalize the fight for a proposed amendment to guarantee equal rights for women. in 1979, 15 states failed to eprove the e.r.a., it was defeated. joining me now, the woman behind this effort, camilla lopez. leslie jane seymour is editor in chief of more magazine. good to see both of you. >> good morning. thank you for having me. >> happy to see you. it is really interesting the equal rights amendment was never ratified. 21 states, though, in the meantime added similar amendments to their constitution. so why take this on? some people will say, well, the states that want it have it. >> well, i mean the reason i took it on was because i had no idea that we werent equal. i thought in the united states everybody was equal, and the fact is 96% of us think we are equal. so to me just philosophically the fact that our society is not reflecting in its foundational document that which we believe is a problem. its a philosophic problem, but then upon extending it out into the society, there are lots of problems that come from us not being equal under the law. >> well, one of them that we often talk about is money. take a look, 2012, the annual income for a full-time male, $49,000, for a woman, less than $38,000. heres another comparison. full-time married man, $951 a week. full-time married woman, just $741. is camilla right here, do you think, leslie jane, that theres this perception that things have gotten a lot better, more improvement than there actually has been? >> i think we forget of the and i think the money thing tells you everything you need to know. 77 cents to a dollar for women of what men make. when we had the recession, everybody was saying it was a mancession. isnt it good women earned less so they didnt lose their job as much. but we cant go on like this. until you are making the same amount of money as a man doing the same exact job, were never going to get to parity and the place that we have to be. >> we got into a big discussion, my team did when they were talking about doing this segment, and they were reminded of one of the episodes of the great west wing. let me play you a little clip. >> a new amendment we vote on declaring that i am equal under the law to a man, i am mortified to discover there is reason to believe i wasnt before. i am a citizen of this country. i am not a special subset in need of your protection. i do not have to have my rights handed down to me by a bunch of old, white men. >> so, camilla, how do you respond to women, even a fictional one, who think the 14th amendment which defines who is a u.s. citizen is enough, we dont need an e.r.a. >> i think thats what all of us thought until a couple of years ago, our supreme court justice scalia made very clear that the word male was used in the constitution for the first time in the 14th amendment as specifically men. it did not include women. it was deliberately used to exclude women. and so i understand we dont want our rights handed down by other people, but the fact is when this country was formed, we werent equal. so now that time has gone by, i think we just have to in terms of showing respect to more than half the people in this country, to at least put it in there and say, yes, we understand that in 1787, maybe women werent considered equal in stature in our society, but now things have changed and, therefore, we will put this in our document. because not having equality under the law has major ramifications that go beyond just the gender pay gap. >> an i think it has to do with too we go out there and explore our system. look at our system, it s wonderful, we treat everybody the same way and were trying to get other countries that treat women in poor ways to change. its very hard to do that when we cant even show that we get equal protection under the law, that we get the same amount of money for the same job. i think its wise. >> at the time in 79, there was a big movement and a lot of people got involved, unsuccessfully and they werent able to get it passed. how do you moat tivate that today? how do you get people interested if by the statistics you cite yourself, most people dont think there is a real problem here. >> well, i dont think its that young people dont think theres a problem, i think they just dont know about it. >> i agree. >> because in 1982 when the e.r.a. failed, most people that i talked to werent even born or conscious. so they grow up and they kind of think that everything is equal, and its not. so its just a matter of tell the young people today or anybody that came of age after 1982, hey, guess what, gays can get married today, but you still dont have equal rights. and thats just like a big elephant in the room that nobody is aware of. and i think its so important to just tell everybody and let them make their own decisions. if they think that we still shouldnt be equal, then im confused, but okay. >> but i think what s wonderful is to get it out on social media the way that camilla is doing because thats how you reach a new generation of kids. i have an 18-year-old daughter. i cant wait for her to see it. >> thank you so much as always. camilla lopez, good luck with this. thanks for taking the time to talk with us. >> thank you so much for having me. >> and todays tweet of the day comes from project eve. a group that promotes collaboration among female entrepreneurs. its not about breaking through the glass ceiling, its about building a new house.
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